"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real. It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

--The Velveteen Rabit

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you, and afterwards it all belongs to you."

April 1st, 2004

Mexico AU Drabble. @ 02:39 am

This one's for guede_mazaka, who should consider it food for her ground squirrels.

Written as English paper avoidance and in anticipation of a Guede fic full of jazz, bathtub gin, Latino mobsters, and blind ex-Federal Agents turned piano players.

Rehearsal

The piano at La Casa was a cheap upright, keys made from laquered wood instead of ivory and worn from hard use. It had a woven runner across the top that was trimmed with the same sort of soft little balls that hung around the edges of those stupid sombreros they sold to tourists in Tijuana. Sands had no idea what colour the damn thing was, but he'd bet his own balls it was something loud, probably with violently coloured geometric designs. That clashed. Maybe he should be glad he couldn't see it.

Fuck that. The day he was glad he couldn't see something was the day he'd take that shotgun he knew Fideo had hidden behind the bar somewhere--it couldn't be that hard to find, somewhere under the counter, probably, where a man standing at the cash register could reach under and find it without needing to look--and blow his brains out all over La Casa's lousy, cheap piano. Make the cleaning crew scrub his blood off the fake-ivory keys.

Sands reached his hand to the left, stretching for the next chord in the bass harmony, and just barely managed not to flinch as he hit the wrong pair of keys. Shit. The twelfth fucking time. Why in the name of Zorro's tiny Mexican dick couldn't he get that damn chord right?

On stage, La Carolina, star of La Casa's two-bit stage and bitch queen extraordinaire, broke off her song mid-note. "Madre de Dios, Americano," she snapped. "How long does it take you to learn a simple chord progression?" The click, click, click of her heels against the wooden boards of the stage came closer to him, and Sands imagined her stalking toward the piano, hips swaying. Like a snake.

"Campa could pick up a new number in one rehearsal," she continued, voice contemptuous.

Yeah, well, Campa got himself turned into a human lead mine by Bucho the Butcher, Sands replied inwardly. He didn't say it, of course. No insulting the previous piano player until he'd proven himelf useful enough to keep around. He'd had enough of being thrown out into the gutter to last him a damn long time, and this time there would be no Fred Abberline to pick him up, pump him full of whatever-the-hell-narcotic it Fred was sticking himself with that week, and drop him off on a doorstep like a fucking kitten in a box. "Campa didn't have to learn by ear," he said instead. "Campa wasn't playing by fucking braile." Oops, there went keeping his mouth clean.

"Oh, just shut up and play it again," she snapped. She was practically leaning on the piano now, her voice coming from somewhere just above and to the left of his head. "And this time, get it right, or I'll tell Miguel to find some other charity case to play for me."

Sands manfully supressed the urge to flip her off, and started the piece over again. Carolina waited the obligatory three measures, and then started to sing. If Sands were honest with himself, he would have to admit that her voice wasn't half bad--sort of soft and sultry--though from what he'd heard from Fideo, the main draw of her act was her dancing. However, Sands wasn't in the habit of being honest with anyone, himself occasionally included, so he told himself that her singing was as shrill and breathy as her dancing was clumsy and awkward. He never seen her dance, of course (of course, because Sheldon doesn't see anything nowadays, does he?), but imagining the bitch tripping over those spikey heels (they had to be long and spikey, or else they wouldn't make such a distinctive sound) and breaking her arrogant neck was a lovely mental picture that made playing piano in a lousy Mexican gin joint--tequila joint?--a little more bearable.

The black keys, Sands told himself, were Barillo's fingers, going snap, snap, snap under his heels and ensuring that that was one bootlegger who was never going to play classical piano again. The white keys--at least, he assumed they were white, though they could be any colour, really--were Adjedrez's eyelids, which he was going to dig his thumbs into someday until her eyeballs ran like jelly over his thumbnails. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, sweetheart.

Re: yeah... then that happened

I haven't read that fic, but I have read her wonderfully cracked-out musical one, "Show Biz," which has lots of strangely yummy imagery of Sands as a chorus girl. I spent the rest of the day walking around singing "How do You Solve a Problem Like Sheldon?"